Conversion Bureau: Unlucky Day

Captain Shining Armor strutted through the halls of Canterlot with a tension in the back of his throat. He felt it since he had received the report from Commander Sentry, and was pale since.

He walked up to the doors to the Throne Room and rapped on the doors twice.

"Enter, Captain," the voice said behind it.

Shining Armor slowly opened the door and made his way inside, his training in the Guard the only thing keeping him from breaking down into a nervous wreck.

At the other end of the empty hallway was Empress Celestia herself, waiting for his report. Shining bowed deeply and held his position for the mandatory thirty seconds before rising.

"Your Majesty," he croaked out, "we have received the report from Commander Flash Sentry regarding the Crystal Lake site."

Celestia smiled as she levitated a cup of tea to her muzzle.

"Good. How many have we managed to save from a gruesome fate?" she asked before taking a sip of her tea.

"A-actually, your majesty... there were, massive casualties."

Celestia sighed as she put the cup down.

"As to be expected when landing so close to enemy territory. However, it was for a greater good, and they shall be remembered. How many were lost in the initial force."

"A-all of them."

CRK

Shining flinched as the stone marble in front of him broke into a crater. Celestia's look had gone from her usual motherly one to that of fury.

"Would you care to clarify?" she asked softly.

"The ships and ponies that were sent in the first wave were all slaughtered, the airships torn apart by what looks like lightning strikes and magic."

"Those traitorous curs of the rebellion!" Celestia shouted as she stomped a hoof, all of Canterlot trembling under her might. "What of Twilight and her friends?"

As Shining regained his stance, he pushed his luck to deliver more of the news.

"I-I'm afraid that two of the Bearers of Harmony were Killed in Action, and the Elements themselves were, according to Dame Applejack, destroyed. We're afraid that Dame Pinkamena is missing currently."

The room began to heat up as Celestia's rage grew.

"Tell me we wiped out the traitors and the Humans that did this."

Shining armor gulped.

"A-according to Dame Applejack's report... there was... only one Human there... and he couldn't be killed. Rainbow Dash tried to crush him, Fluttershy tried to Stare him down, and even Twilight herself unleashed a massive blast onto the Human, but... she said it just... kept getting back up."

There are no words, to this day, that could convey the storm that erupted within Celestia.

\\\//////

Applejack wiped her muzzle as she came up to the stairwell. It had been an exhausting few hours on the airship and she was ready to fall over and sleep for the rest of the week.

She was currently on her way down to the barracks deck to see if Rarity needed somepony to comfort her, and perhaps share in her pain. The mare could barely shoulder the burden of making a dress, how could she handle the deaths of two of their closest friends?

As she stepped down through the ship's sealed stairway, she let loose a few tears for her departed friends. She tried to steel herself, saying that there would be time to mourn later, but she couldn't hold back the raw pain in her soul.

She pushed open the door to the deck, and-

plop

Applejack paused as she felt her hoof land in a puddle. Curious as to how a top-of-the-line airship could have a leak this large, she wiped away her tears to see...

... blood.

Her entire hoof, up to her wrist, was soaked in the crimson liquid.

She quickly looked down to see the entire entryway was almost flooded with blood, nearing the doorway.

Horror seized her throat, denying her a chance to vocalize her terror as she examined the pooling blood. She traced the flow of it and found a mess of bodies littering the hallway.

There were dead Guards everywhere, their bodies mutilated and their insides pouring out of various wounds. Most had their barrels sliced open wide enough that their intestines were rolling out over themselves while a few had their jaws ripped clean off. One pony's head was severed from his body, the neck crushed in such an angle that it looked like something had stomped him to death.

Applejack's eyes widened as her jaw twitched, only a few small noises coming out of her as she tried to back away.

A familiar shriek of terror echoed through the hallway.

"Rarity!" Applejack shouted.

Applejack carefully moved over the streams of blood and piles of gore as she raced to try and find her friend's room. As she did, she found more corpses in her path, soaking the fine carpet of the hallways a deep red. There was one body crashed through a door, the splinters cutting into his neck, while another one was pulverized into a grate in the ceiling, dangling while blood dripped from the vent.

Applejack turned a corner and burst into one of the rooms.

"Rarity!"

She looked around the room in a panic, distraught that it looked like there wasn't a struggle, and almost nothing was out of place. The bathroom door was wide open and nopony was inside. Applejack turned around to try and see where her friend could have gone, or if there was any sign of the murderer.

Looking back outside, she knew that there was only one monster that could have done that, but she knew that it couldn't have made it here, it couldn't have. They were in the air and had some of Equestria's finest aboard, there's no way...

She looked down to find a dried spot of mud in the carpet in the shape of a Human's boot.

"No, no no no no," Applejack whispered to herself as she approached the closet it was in front of.

She slowly reached out to open the closet door, and swung it open before taking a step back.

Inside the closet was Rarity, sitting with her back to the door.

Applejack sighed in relief that her friend was in one piece, and moved up to the white unicorn.

"Rarity, thank Celestia ya'll are alright."

Rarity did nothing to respond, sitting there still as a statue.

"Don't worry, that monster's gone for now. Ah don't know where it is, but ya need ta get outta here right now, come on."

Applejack grabbed Rarity by the shoulder and pulled her.

Rarity's corpse fell over and revealed her fate.

Rarity's eyes were impaled by knitting needles dead center in her corneas, her neck split open with a wire hanger's hook sticking out of her mouth.

"AAAHHH!" Applejack screamed as she backed away from the mutilated display of her friend.

Applejack tried to feel something as she back away from the corpse, trying to comprehend how she had met her end.

But instead, all she could feel was weightlessness.

... and the room turning.

... and something pulling her rear leg.

Applejack struggled to come to her senses as the masked Human from Crystal Lake lifted her up by her hind leg, coming eye-to-eye with the terrified farm pony.

Before she could decide on how to react or feel in any way, Jason made the decision for her.

Pain.

Jason brought his arm back before grabbing Applejack's left foreleg at the base. In a second, he pulled and Applejack screamed in agony. She could feel bones and muscles break under her fur as the murderer stretched her limb to its absolute limit. She tried to rear back her other back hoof to buck him in the face, but only managed to slap his mask in a pathetic display. She tried to pry the killer's steel-like grip off of her foreleg, but didn't manage to make him budge.

Then, she snapped.

Literally.

Applejack cried out in pain as her left foreleg was ripped off of her body, the nerves tearing last as Jason pulled if off of her before tossing it to the side. He grabbed the other foreleg and repeated the process slowly, tearing both of her front legs off in less than a minute.

The apple family mare wailed in suffering as she felt her forelegs ripped off of her body, and prayed for it to end.

When the second foreleg came off, Jason adjusted his grip and held the mare upside down, gripping her by both of her hind legs.

Applejack looked up with a pleading tear in her eyes as she shook her head.

"N-no, please," she begged.

Jason pulled his arms in separate directions as the mare screamed. Applejack could feel her pelvic region creak and crack from the strain, and flailed her barrel to try and escape his grasp.

After what felt like an agonizing eternity, Applejack's pain reached unfathomable heights as her rear end split open, her lower organs being granted air for the first time.

Unable to properly make any sound, Applejack felt herself paralyze internally as her brain shut itself down to keep the pain away. She could feel the numbing sensation of her spine being torn down the middle as her killer stretched his arms out further, until only her head remained.

Satisfied with his work, Jason suddenly released the remains of Applejack and let her fall on top of her friend's corpse. The mare was split down the middle from her rear to the back of her head, and would likely die slowly within the next few minutes. Just as his late mother taught him, sometimes, they have to suffer before you let them die.

A fog enveloped the room as Jason walked to the door, fading away to only reveal the remnants of the Bearers of Harmony.